Australians Urged to Send Facebook Intimate Images before They Can be Shared in Revenge

There are a number of reasons that some of your
more-intimate snaps, should you choose to take them, may fall into nefarious
hands; maybe your phone was stolen or hacked, or perhaps you’re worried in the
aftermath of a bitter breakup. In these situations the biggest fear is that
those pictures may be shared on online platforms, be that publicly or privately,
bringing untold misery, humiliation and embarrassment upon the subject.

You would hope that this would be a rare occurrence if it
indeed happened at all, but current figures and recent headlines both tell a
very different story. This fact has not escaped the notice of Australian e-safety
commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who told ABC,
“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at
one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos
more broadly.”

According to Ms Inman Grant, one-in-five Australian women
aged 18-45 and one-in-four Indigenous Australians are victims of such abuse.

Now in an effort to prevent such private images from being
shared online in an act of what has become known as ‘revenge-porn’, the Australian
Government’s e-Safety Department is partnering with Facebook to launch an initiative
whereby users who may be worried about their intimate photos being shared
online can contact the e-Safety Commissioner, who may then make the rather
unexpected suggestion that they act pre-emptively and send the images to themselves
via Messenger.

While it may seem counter-intuitive to upload private photos
to an online social media platform in an effort to stop them being spread on,
well, an online social media platform (in many cases the same exact one), there
is a little more sense behind the idea than it may first appear.

“It would be like sending yourself your image in email, but
obviously this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image
without sending it through the ether,” Ms Inman Grant explained.

Once received, the image will then be “hashed” by Facebook
and converted into a code or digital fingerprint, while the photo itself is not
saved. If another user subsequently tries to upload the same image Facebook’s
algorithms will recognise the digital fingerprint and not allow it to be
posted, so you can proceed without worry that your privacy may be violated on
the platform.

“They’re not storing the image; they’re storing the link and
using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies,” clarified
Ms Inman Grant. “So if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would
have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being
uploaded.”

Antigone Davis, Head of Global Safety at Facebook, told ABC
that Australia is in fact one of four countries participating in the “industry-first”
program, which utilises “cutting-edge technology” in an effort to prevent the
re-sharing of images on its platforms.

“The safety and wellbeing of the Facebook community is our
top priority,” concluded Ms Davis.